July 13, 2001

CANONIZING
ST. SLOBOMaking a hero out of a smalltime hood

With
the arrest and coming show trial of Slobodan Milosevic,
we have several years of the most unpleasant
prospects ahead of us. First of all, don't think it's
going to end with Slobo: already the Bosnian Serbs are
being pressured to give up Radovan Karadzic and General
Ratko Mladic, accused of "war crimes" in Bosnia, and
we can look forward to ceaseless demands for more and
more alleged "war criminals" to be extradited and sacrificed
on the altar of the International Tribunal for War Crimes
in the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY). When all resistance
to Albanian military aggression is deemed to be a "war
crime," every Slav is a potential "war criminal." If
Carla the Implacable had her way she would put them
all in the dock.

THINGS GET
WORSE

Oh yes,
it's going to be insufferable, and it'll last forever.
As the Balkans explode in yet another Albanian-driven crisis,
this time in Macedonia, the show trial in The Hague will rationalize
Western intervention as a "preventive" measure. The self-righteous
pronunciamentoes of Carla Del Ponte, the partisan piety
of Christiane Amanpour, the exhortations of "human rights"
imperialists of the right and the left to extend "democracy"
and "the rule of law" to every corner of the globe –
this braying chorus of hags and nags is going to be deafening,
and continuous. The air is already thick with propaganda.
In a sense, we will all have to re-live the days of the Kosovo
war, not only in following the details of the trial, but also
in separating truth from fiction, and distinguishing facts
from the party line. In short, it'll be like old times again
– only worse, much worse, not only for the Serbian
people, but for American non-interventionists.

STRAIGHT FROM
CENTRAL CASTING

As I
pointed outin
two previous columns, propaganda is the whole point of
this show trial: to stigmatize and criminalize Serbian nationalism
by associating it with Milosevic and his neo-Communist supporters.
The target, of course, is President Vojislav Kostunica, a
nationalist who is also a liberal constitutionalist: the NATO-crats
hope that with Kostunica's political demise they can also
bring about the abolition of Yugoslavia. News reports from
Yugoslavia indicate that Kostunica and his Democratic Party
of Serbia (DSS) are more popular than ever, with growing numbers
of former Milosevic supporters deserting the old Socialist
Party and joining the DSS in droves. The show trial will re-polarize
a nationalist movement that was in the process of merging
its "left" and "right" wings, and further undermine Kostunica's
base. It will also put the Milosevic wing of Serbian nationalism
in the spotlight, where its representatives will play out
their assigned role as the Bad Guys. As in any WWF
tournament, it's the villains – the growling, grimacing
guys in black leather trunks – who draw in the spectators
and generate the excitement. In this sense, the grimly glowering
Slobodan Milosevic might just as well have been sent by Central
Casting.

IN DENIAL

Yes, we
have a lot to look forward to, none of it good. In
addition to the pontifications of the War Party, who will
claim that the trial justifies their war of aggression and
legitimizes their phony Tribunal, we will have to listen to
the rantings of Slobo's defenders – just as bad, in
their own way, if not worse. Worse, because their denialism
is absurd in the face of the unfolding evidence. A
Reuters story released today [July 12], headlined "Academics
Defend Milosevic," informs us that: "Slobodan Milosevic is
innocent, evidence of mass graves is dubious and Serbs worldwide
and their allies are ready to help defend him against NATO
persecution, members of his international support committee
say." Christopher Black, a Canadian lawyer and Communist
Party activist, has organized the International Committee
to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM): "We are hoping to organize
publicity campaigns, cultural campaigns – all sorts
of methods to raise public consciousness about what's really
going on."

EVEN A FETUS

Part of
what's really not going on, at least from Black's perspective,
is the
unearthing of hundreds of bodies, complete with identification
papers, in Serbia, and the exposure of what is being called
"Operation Asanacija" – the digging up of civilians
slaughtered in Kosovo and reburied in Serbia. The bodies of
women and children, and even a fetus, have been unearthed
in areas where the Serbian "special forces" had their training
camps: the [London] Times claims 150, so far.

REALITY CHECK

Virtually
all the news stories on this grisly discovery have included
inflated figures, ranging from 600 to 800, which are estimates
for how many bodies they expect to dig up. But no matter
how inflated these figures may turn out to be, the reality
is that a great many bodies have already been discovered,
and the evidence for the reburial operation is, in my view,
perfectly credible if not yet conclusive. There seems little
doubt that Slobodan Milosevic did indeed order the killing
of hundreds of civilians during the Kosovo war, and then tried
to cover it up – or else what are all those bodies doing
in unmarked graves on Serbian soil?

DISAPPEARING
ACT

Oh, but
ICDSM honcho Christopher Black has an answer for that, according
to the Reuters story: "'We've been hearing stories about mass
graves since the start of the (Balkan) wars and every time
you examine those alleged mass graves... they just disappear,'
he said, appearing to take issue with the widely accepted
findings of many investigators and forensic experts over the
past decade." So, if we squint hard enough, and long enough,
our vision will begin to blur, and we can "disappear" the
bodies coming out of the ground in Serbia as if they had never
existed.

THE BIG LETDOWN

Yes, we
have indeed been hearing about mass graves and "genocide"
for quite a long time, all through the Kosovo war. Yet nothing
on the scale we were led to believe was ever discovered in
Kosovo proper, where a total of about 3,000 bodies were found,
including hundreds of slain Serbs, Gypsies, and others. As
the war wound down, so did the claims of the War Party about
the number of Kosovar casualties: first it was 100,000, then
50,000, and finally this was reduced, in the war's aftermath,
to 10,000. Unable to back up their hyperbolic accusations
of "genocide," the Tribunal had to settle, in the end, for
an indictment accusing Milosevic of ordering the deaths of
some 340 people. It was a big letdown, a stunning anticlimax
to years of expectations that he would be charged with genocide.
While there is talk that the charges may be expanded, this
is easier said than done, and, in any case, this radical scaling
down of the charges against a man who was supposed to be the
21st century equivalent of Hitler has made the
Tribunal and its Anglo-American amen-corner look a little
silly.

PROFILES IN
SILLINESS

Unfortunately, this is matched if not surpassed by the
silliness of Slobo's defenders, whose denialist rhetoric makes
the "human rights" imperialists look like paragons of logic
and reason. According to the denialists, Milosevic is entirely
innocent, not a typical Balkan gangster but a hero whose
only crime was to defend his country against NATO, and they
demand his immediate release – not to be tried for the
various crimes he is accused of in Serbia, but to be freed,
and, perhaps, reinstated as the true President of Yugoslavia.
(Kostunica "stole" the election, according to Mr. Black, just
like George W. Bush "stole" the election from Al Gore.)

TRUTH VS. PROPAGANDA

Antiwar.com was born, as many of you know, as an effort
to get past the propaganda and discern at least some
portion of the truth about what was really going on during
the Kosovo war. We learned, during those months, to be skeptical
of atrocity stories, to question everything put out by government
sources, especially our own – but also to question the
sometimes extravagant claims of the Yugoslavians, which were
often no closer to the truth. If Western "news" stories were
mostly NATO press releases printed verbatim, then the "news"
coming out of Belgrade was in many instances no more accurate
or dependable. Milosevic's propaganda machine was crude, clunky,
and unconvincing, no match for NATO'S sophisticated wartime
public relations operation – and even less so these
days.

YOUNG MEN IN
BLACK SHIRTS

If you doubt
that, you have only to check out the ICDSM website, where visitors
are treated to a huge picture of a thuggish-looking guy in
a black tee-shirt waving his fist in front of a crowd of banner-wielding
young men similarly attired. On first glance it looks like
a Hitler Youth rally, or, perhaps, Mussolini's march on Rome,
but the accompanying copy tells a different story:

"Pictures from Friday, June 29th Demonstration in
Belgrade. This included people from the Radical Party, the
Socialist Party, Serbian Renewal, Serbian Unity as well as
other parties plus tens of thousands of people who might have
voted for the DOS [Democratic Opposition of Serbia] authorities
but are now furious that these leaders have kidnapped the
former Yugoslav head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, and shipped
him to the discredited Tribunal at The Hague."

TARGET: KOSTUNICA

As to why
anyone posing as a defender of the Serbian people would advertise
a connection with the Serbian
Radical Party  which, unlike the determinedly multiculturalist
Milosevic and his commie wife, really does openly advocate
ethnic cleansing of non-Serbians from the former Yugoslavia
 is waaay beyond me. I would also note that the main
target of the ICDSM seems to be not the Tribunal, or its legitimacy,
but President Kostunica and his party, whom the ICDSM accuses
of conspiring with Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic before
"they illegally kidnapped President Milosevic." Material posted
on their website accuses Kostunica of presiding over a "coup":
no mention is made of Kostunica's
spirited denunciation of Slobo's extradition, and there
is little detailed analysis of the Tribunal or its authoritarian
methods.

IN NEVER-NEVER
LAND

We are,
however, treated to a bizarre "biography" of Slobodan
Milosevic which makes no mention of his election defeat at
Kostunica's hands, although it dutifully reports the "sweeping
victory" he enjoyed in the 1992 Serbian state elections. In
the never-never land of the Slobodan Milosevic Fan Club, he
is still "President Slobodan Milosevic," and is reverently
described as "a leading personality in the Republic of Serbia
whose name is associated with the establishment of its constitutional-legal
unity and the most important state and national interests
of our country and its citizens." If they can wish away all
those bodies coming out of the Serbian soil, then referring
to the defeated Slobo, languishing away in his prison cell,
as "President Milosevic," the Thomas Jefferson of Yugoslavia,
is but a small matter.

AN ORDINARY
EVIL

The ICDSM
is comic-opera stuff, not really to be taken all that seriously
– except as an example of what to avoid. In denying
that Milosevic was or is a figure of towering Hitlerian evil,
it was obvious to most people that his relatively smalltime
evil was entirely ordinary for that part of the world. In
rejecting the war propaganda of the NATO powers that portrayed
the Serbs as engaged in a "genocidal" campaign of "ethnic
cleansing," I never believed they were entirely blameless,
either. Antiwar.com's position was – and is –
that it wasn't our fight, and that the US should have stayed
well out of it. While we rejected the Serbian "devil theory,"
which ascribed all responsibility for the conflict and wanton
killing to Belgrade, neither did we believe that the Serbs
were angels.

NOT TAKEN BY
SURPRISE

We are therefore
unsurprised to learn that Milosevic probably killed hundreds,
and certainly not tens of thousands as initially claimed:
nor does this change our position on the legality or morality
of the Kosovo war. The near certainty that old Slobo is a
relatively minor gangster, and indeed a murderer, does not
make the case for the Kosovo war: on the contrary, the evidence
so far proves that the war accelerated and expanded Milosevic's
murderousness, and that without it the casualties would have
been much lighter. We also note, with some satisfaction, that
the myth of Serbian "genocide" against the Albanians has been
partly dispelled by the paucity of the formal charges so far
leveled against Milosevic.

HOW TO PUT
ON A SHOW TRIAL

Remember,
though, that a show trial is not supposed to be all that convincing:
it doesn't have to be, in order to hold the world's attention
or gain widespread sympathy. The Moscow Trials, in which various
former top Soviet officials were accused of fantastic crimes
by Stalin's henchmen, weren't all that convincing either:
everybody knew the "confessions" of Bukharin and others were
phony, yet millions believed the charges. The aim of such
a trial is not to convince onlookers that there is any fairness
in the proceedings, but to show them that the judges have
the power to enforce their decisions.

SWORD OF DAMOCLES

The seizure
of Milosevic, you'll note, was followed by declarations from
Croatia and even the hardline Bosnian Serbs that they would
extradite their own accused war criminals to The Hague as
fast as possible. As a display of naked power, the trial of
Slobodan Milosevic is already proving its value. No wonder
Carla Del Ponte is saying the trial could last for ten years:
she and her cohorts want this sword of Damocles hanging permanently
over the heads of any leaders who dare resist the Eastward
expansion of the EU-NATO alliance.

A SURREALISTIC
FARCE

If the prosecution
and the Tribunal – they are one and the same 
doesn't come off all that well, what with their secret evidence,
masked witnesses, and ready admission of hearsay evidence,
then the defense is even less sympathetic. With Christopher
Black and the ICDSM thrown into the picture for comic relief,
claiming that Milosevic didn't touch a single hair on an Albanian
head, the scene is set for a real farce in The Hague. As the
last Stalinists in the world – Ramsey
Clark and his American Commie co-thinkers, Christopher
Black and the Communist
Party of Canada, and old-fashioned dupes like the surrealist
playwright Harold
Pinter  rally around the last Stalinist in Europe,
the trial of Slobodan Milosevic takes on the air of one of
Pinter's surrealist plays, in which the actors utter gibberish
against a forbidding backdrop of stark unreality.

BACKLASH

The canonization
of St. Slobo is a phenomenon, I'm afraid, that is not confined
to the far Left, but has even infiltrated the non-interventionist
Right. Taki complained
the other day that poor old Slobo "has been made out to
be as nasty a tyrant and schemer as there is, but it's all
a creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia  i.e., it's pure unadulterated bullshit.
In fact, I'll go even further. Milosevic deserves respect
and admiration for his defiant demeanor before the kangaroo
court in the Hague." This is an indication of just what we
have got ourselves in for. The spectacle of the ominously
authoritarian Tribunal seizing and jailing the ex-leader of
a defeated nation, and vowing that they'll convict him even
if it takes ten years to do it, has created such a backlash
of contempt that even Milosevic begins to look "admirable."

NO ILLUSIONS

But non-interventionists
must have no illusions about old Slobo, whose grossly exaggerated
crimes are, in spite of that, all too real. He was, indeed,
a nasty tyrant, and no decent person can or should defend
his record: indeed, for non-interventionists to base their
case for Western disengagement from the Balkans on a defense
of Milosevic personally and politically would be disastrous.
For this would have to mean that every body dug out of the
raw Serbian dirt, every bone fragment, every murder unearthed
would stand as a refutation and a reproach – a position
the War Party would dearly like to see us in. The case against
US intervention in the Balkans, in Iraq, or anywhere else
for that matter, cannot rest on the argument that the leaders
of these countries are really benevolent or even "admirable."
The world is full of leaders who are far from admirable, yet
that hardly means we need to troll about overthrowing them.

A LESSON LEARNED

The case
against US intervention is being made in the headlines every
day, as the Albanian genie we let out of the bottle continues
to rampage through the Balkans. This, and not Slobodan Milosevic's
supposedly admirable qualities, is the truth the Tribunal
is trying to obscure. Our policy was supposed to secure "peace,"
but instead it has sown the seeds of a much wider war: this
is the chief lesson of the Kosovo war, one that doesn't require
whitewashing Milosevic before it is learned.

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